Eat Lead: The Return Of Matt Hazard Review [PS3, Xbox 360]

Posted May 18, 2009 by Michael Curley in PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360.

Reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

A lot of games take a stab at humor in one way or another, whether it’s the 4th wall breaking of the Metal Gear Solid series, or the wise cracking sidekicks of many a platforming game, but it’s somewhat rarer to see an outright parody of games. Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard manages to be both an effective and funny parody, and a pretty good game in its own right.

As you might have guessed from the title, you play as Matt Hazard, a video game star from the 80s who’s been in every genre from arcade action to Kart racing, as he’s embarking on his new comeback game, or so he thinks, until he finds out the developers are in fact trying to kill him off in favor of a new, “Next Gen” protagonist. The rest of the game follows Matt trying to stay ahead of the developers as they throw all his old enemies at him, from Russian commandos to zombies to space marines and even 2D Nazis. You’ll also meet some of his old allies, including the Master Chef (Yes, Chef), Captain Carpenter (a Mario pastiche), and Bill the Wizard, who for some reason talks like William Shatner.

The meat of the game is a pretty standard third-person shooter, with its central element being the cover system, where you can shoot from cover, and dash to obstacles you can see with a press of a button. The system works pretty well, though you’re bound to accidentally find yourself pressing against the wrong side of a box now and again. The controls are responsive enough, though mapping the fire button to R2 instead of R1 can lead to some confusion early on until you get used to it.

The gameplay itself is pretty straight forward: Just keep moving ahead and kill everything in your way, which is pretty refreshing, and works as a good callback to the sorts of games Hazard was supposedly “starring” in back in the day. The only problems with the controls are that Matt doesn’t move as quickly as you might expect, and there could’ve been more variety in the melee department.

The difficulty can also be maddening at some points, because Matt, for an action hero, is surprisingly fragile, and your enemies have an annoying tendency to swarm you, and are surprisingly bright. The last few boss fights in particular tend to throw just a little bit more at you than you can handle.

The game looks pretty good, with lots of detailed character models and environments. The characters can be pretty expressive, and there’s a nice “glitch” effect that happens whenever either the developers or your ally hacks something into the game for you.

The music works well, with a varied mix of themes that usually reflects what sorts of enemies are about to jump you: Sweeping epic music for the space marines, a pastiche of the James Bond theme for the Russians, that sort of thing. And each weapon has its own distinct sound, making it clear just what you’re up against. The voice acting is also pretty good, with the voices of Will Arnett and Neil Patrick Harris serving Hazard and his nemesis, the CEO of his game company, respecitvely. The only place the sound falls short is in the cutscenes, where things like explosion effects and punches are muted, or even absent entirely. It really jars when you’re in a pitched battle, then in the cutscene a building explodes almost silently.

By far, though, the biggest thing going for the game is the humor, without which it would have been a more or less generic third-person shooter. Matt has a snide remark about just about everything that happens, including the opening tutorial and things like using long elevator rides to hide loading screens: Half way through the first such elevator ride, he turns to the camera and remarks, “Oh settle down. If you had anything important to do, you wouldn’t be playing a game.” There’s references and jabs at just about every action game you can think of, including a quick shot taken at Duke Nukem Forever.

While it would have been a good but otherwise forgettable action game on its own, the humor and parody of Eat Lead helps it distinguish itself among a glutted genre. If you’ve been gaming for a while and are into action games in particular, it’s worth playing through at least once just for all the references and jokes.

Tagged as D3, Eat Lead, The Return Of Matt Hazard, Vicious Cycle Software